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The Forum > Article Comments > The rise and rise of drug-related mental health problems > Comments

The rise and rise of drug-related mental health problems : Comments

By Rowan Fairbairn and Nich Rogers, published 3/10/2005

Rowan Fairburn and Nich Rogers outline the treatment needed for young drug addicted people with mental health problems.

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I thank Rowan Fairburn and Nich Rogers for their timely article.

Teenagers today are literally bombarded by "Youth Culture" that doing drugs is fun, harmless, and a right of passage into adulthood. Disk jockeys on youth oriented radio constantly make snide references to illegal drugs, hinting to the young and impressionable that substance abuse is cool and hip. Youth pop magazines like "Muzic" give stories about the latest fashionable nightclubs, where twenty something patrons "dance with their arms in the air, clutching their water bottles."

Pop music is full of drug references, with illegal drugs like ecstasy given code names like "E" or "X". Pop stars like the execrable "Eminen" give performances on stage where they fumble in their pockets and "accidently" drop a pocketful of pills (or lookalikes) all aver the stage for the benefit of their young audience. Movies and TV shows show role model stars engaging in substance abuse as normal behaviour. While "Renton" in the movie "Trainspotting" applauds the effects of heroin by saying "Think of the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by 1000 and you are not even close."

The result has been an upsurge of younger and younger children from even priveleged backgrounds who are becoming drug dependent or dying of overdoses. The time has come for stronger censorship of the entertainment industries.

If we as a society have the wit to understand the connection between tobacco advertising and youth smoking, why can we not make the same connection with the pop industry endoresment of illegal drugs and rising rates of drug abuse?

One wonders if the drug addled pop stars of today who promote themselves as the leaders of the young generation, are not getting kickbacks from the narcotrafficantes for promoting their wares.
Posted by redneck, Monday, 3 October 2005 10:26:24 AM
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‘One wonders if the drug addled pop stars of today who promote themselves as the leaders of the young generation, are not getting kickbacks from the narcotrafficantes for promoting their wares.’
Haha, you mean like when sports stars hawk beer?

The key here is a proper education on the dangers AND benefits of drugs. No one ever makes the claim that drugs are harmless. But the benefits are all too readily ignored. The abusers give the users a bad rep, the scare tactics are pulled out, and so on.

What you’re pointing too red, is rebellion. The youth are interested in it not despite it’s taboo, but rather because of it. If you keep telling a teenager lies like: ‘Marijuana will make you INSANE!!’ obviously they’re not going to believe it because they have excellent BS detectors. Unfortunately they may also not believe anything else you tell them, because the lies have tainted any good information that could be given to them.

In one or two states they have been trialling MDMA as an anti-depressant, and as I understand, with fairly decent results. Being familiar with the substance myself I can’t say I’m surprised. As long as it’s not mixed with crap, it’s not very dangerous at all. That’s a scientific fact. What makes a pill dangerous is the crap you get mixed in when you get it off the street. If things like this weren’t criminalised, you wouldn’t get any of the crap…does anyone see where I’m going with this?

But I digress. I’ve had much experience with people with depression, manic depression and even schizophrenia, and I can tell you right now, if drugs are on the list of causes, they’re way down the list after things like abuse and persecution.

I’m not advocating drugs at all. I’m just saying they shouldn’t be demonised, because then claims are made that are completely false, and ignorance never helped anyone.
Posted by spendocrat, Monday, 3 October 2005 11:12:37 AM
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I agree on the issue of disc jocks and the music multinationals making bucks by presenting drug abuse as cool. Look no further at our own government owned ABC Radio 2JJJ. The "J" being easily recognised on the street as the short form of "Joint".

It is time we had a really good look at this industry. And what is most apparent is that we are dealing with multinational corporations who play a key, and well documented role in the perceptual positioning behind the marketing of dangerous products without any chain of custody or responsibility. And many of its major beneficiaries then go on to assume positions of power and some prestige.

Take, for example, the Federal Member for Kingsford Smith, Peter Garret, who kicked off his music career by providing the mood music, if you will, in one of Sydney's most conspicuous "smack pits" just off Oxford Street Darlinghust back in the early 80's. I know, I was there. I drove taxi, night shift, out of Surry Hills. One got the impression there were more dealers in the audience than customers, who came, scored and left.

This is not, in any way, meant to suggest that Mr Garret was a dealer. But people who make millions flogging songs with a so-called "social conscience" should really be asked why it is that, apart from Neil Young and a few others, none of them appear to have troubled themselves to write songs about a serious social issue that was and remains, right under their very nose.

Given the number of deaths and the amount of human misery involved, the music industry has to do a whole better than merely say, "don't shoot me I'm only the piano player". They are bloody millionaires.
Posted by Perseus, Monday, 3 October 2005 2:38:58 PM
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Well Rowan and Nick your title really got me in - then I found your article was on a different, albeit already familar, topic.

You see, I took your reference to "drug-related mental health problems" to mean the side effects and even direct effects of many mass market drugs that are said by drug companies to alleviate mental illness symptoms. There is growing evidence that many of these do not do what they are supposed, create new mental and other problems, and may in the long term leave a person taking them in a worse state than if they had never started.

Probably the best example of this is "Zoloft" (known generically as sertraline). This was the most prescribed drug in Australia ..period.. during financial year 2003. It is now banned for use on children and adolescents by the TGA because, although it is an anti-depressant, it can actually make young people suicidal!! What a strange world we live in when this can happen?

May I suggest in future that you insert the word "illicit" before the word "drug" so that folk like me will not begin reading your articles on the wrong foot. Otherwise, keep up the good work.

Cheers

Mark McMahon
Posted by Markmac, Monday, 3 October 2005 4:54:35 PM
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Rowan and Nich

Thank you for your article.

I have been a psychiatric/mental health nurse since 1978. I guess I have seen most things in that time.

Certainly, the incidence of illicit drug induced psychosis, has been escalating - especially over the last 10 years.

It is important to note that young drug users are rarely on one substance - it is a polydrug use society for many young people.

I spent the last five years in community mental health nursing. Young people in NSW under 18 years of age have few places to go for help. Hardly any adolescent facilities and too young for adult facilities.

The last young person I nursed in a drug induced psychosis was on: legal bundy rum, and then the illegal stuff, vis a vis: potent hydroponic marijuana (enough to blow your head off without anything else), dropping a few "Es" or some "ice" and daitura (a South American plant more potent than magic mushies). This young person was floridly psychotic all of the time. His parents blamed me for not "curing" him. The bottom line was - I could not stop him using.

He was totally out of control and crazy. He did not think that there was anything wrong with him. Absolutely no insight. If his parents had let go, we might have stood a chance. I tried family therapy to no avail. They wanted me to fix everything - but they did not was to take any responsibility for their very poor relationship with their child.

Long hard battle on this one!
Cheers
Kay
Posted by kalweb, Monday, 3 October 2005 5:43:26 PM
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In Australia we opted for the harm minimisation route to treatment. This means steering away from the disease concept and just accepting harmful drug behaviour as normal behaviour. Harm min has the difficulty of giving double messages to the user. On the one hand it says it's going to harm you if you use and in an unsterile way and on the other it says go ahead on smaller cleaner doses and we'll support you but we won't supply you the drug you want, only the harder nastier stuff the government hands out. Young people, in fact not just the young but all drug users are affected by prohibition now into our third generation in this country. As time goes on and the war against drug addicts progresses more people are killed off by unrealiable supply and more are shifted onto government substances which also kill off drug dependent people. The drug dependence problem just won't go away and the governments prohibition policy is killing off more people. Harm minimisation policy is a response by resposible health workers in combating prohibition. This is worth argusing about. I'd like to comment on the idea that a drug dependent person can have two or more diagnoses - comorbidity. This is a nonsense unless the client has been clean and sober for a period when a firm diagnosis can be made. The reason for this, as every informed drug worker knows, is that the symptons of drug dependence can mimic all forms of mental illness. This is why psychiatrists frequently mis-diagnose when they fail to take a drug/alc history. There are thousands of people in this country who have been mis-diagnosed in this way, I am one of them. It is not always the Drs fault because clients often won't reveal their drug use. However, it's a major problem. Depression is a common sympton of drug dependence and the last thing any responsible therpist would want to do is place a drug depressed person on antidepressants, but it happens all the time, it happened to me.
Good luck with the work - Barfenzie
Posted by Barfenzie, Monday, 3 October 2005 9:34:32 PM
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Drug abuse and mental illness are each formidable problems on their own, and when the two coincide they probably are even worse than the sum of their parts. As Kay has pointed out, polydrug use significantly complicates the situation even more.

Who knows how to solve this problem ? At least intelligent discussion is a good start. I think Spendocrat is repeating popular myth by claiming that the impurities in illicit drugs are a cause of the problem. There are plenty of studies which find no evidence of significant qualtities of harmful impurities in street drugs in Australia today (although there are plenty of incidences of one illegal drug being sold as another). Furthermore, marijuana is probably the illegal drug which is most commonly associated with mental health issues and I'm at a loss to see how this can in any way be blamed on impurities.

Harm minimisation usually means reasonably ineffective government campaigns. I agree that it would be very productive if music icons gave something back to the people who made them great, but seeing as how music stars seem to be more concerned about being cool than anything else I doubt that many of them would risk undermining their image by speaking at length on things like mental health or drug abuse.
Posted by AndrewM, Monday, 3 October 2005 10:26:00 PM
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‘I think Spendocrat is repeating popular myth…’
You better KNOW it before you accuse me of it, Andrew.

I wasn’t claiming these are the only cause. I was pointing out that they are one of the causes that people tend to forget. And it’s not a myth. If you look on pillreports.com, you’ll find assessments of levels of purity of the ecstasy that is on the street right now. It’s varied, to say the least. In relation to marijuana, the hydroponic kind is far more likely to be related to mental health issues, but even then, only if the person is already predisposed to the illness and almost invariably only when it is smoked in excess.

As far as this whole blaming rock stars thing that seems to be going on in these posts, I put to you the following hypothesis:

1. Rock stars make great music sometimes not just despite drugs, but actually because of them (The Beatles made a song called Yellow Submarine. Do you know how high they were?).
2. If we accept the above, we must accept that drugs have positive effects as well as negative.
3. Rock stars who are against drugs are usually lifeless boring mediocre sell-outs who instead of supposedly encouraging drug use, probably are out hawking Pepsi or something.
4. Neither has any particular effect on sales of the artist.
5. Rock stars don't advocate drugs but rather advocate personal choice, and assert that you should make up your OWN mind. Ooooh, scary thought, huh?
6. If a rock star makes the personal choice to take drugs, he/she should not have to lie to the public about it.
7. It’s not ‘Sex and milk and rock and roll’.

Alcohol and cigarettes are responsible for more deaths and illnesses than pot, heroin, ecstasy, acid and coke combined.

Any questions?

PS: A clarification, in my last post I meant to say ‘one or two states in the USA’. I forgot ‘USA’.
PPS: During the same trials they found evidence that MDMA also possibly helps bring cancer into remission. Is there anything it CANT do??
Posted by spendocrat, Tuesday, 4 October 2005 9:48:05 AM
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Sometimes i think these articles need some sort of gyroscope to keep them on track: how do we get from a discussion on the problems of youth, mental illness and drugs onto some stupid debate on the role of pop stars and drug taking? Jesus Wept!

These guys have posited a way forward for a problem ( not as big as one would think ) but a still a problem and the usual suspects come out guns a blazin with a plethora of crack pot ideas; pop stars and kick backs indeed!

The problem young people face is as the authors describe; part of it is born out of mickey mouse turf wars betweem health workers themselves - we now have such a purist approach to these issues we have developed a new suffering realted to "dual diagnosis" - ie you get pissed and you take drugs - then no one wants to know you; add to that the youth factor and you are well and truly in the too hard basket.
Posted by sneekeepete, Tuesday, 4 October 2005 11:54:11 AM
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i think that the relationship between the music industry, drugs and mental illness does have a very relevant place in the discussion here - but not for the reasons listed above. as someone who works in both the music and the art industries, i am around many hugely creative people, and a lot of people who take drugs of all kinds. i am also around a high proportion of people who suffer from some form of mental illness, and who self-medicate using drugs, and alcohol.

it is not an easy thing to find that you do not fit into society, and it is a place that many young people, and many creative people, find themselves in. i know a lot of people who use drugs to escape the 'real' world, because they experience depression and other aspects of mental illness. they can not face their reality, and so they don't. for some, drugs open up their creativity. it is not done because it is 'cool', although there is at times pressure to participate. it is done because a) it is readily available, b) cause it is fun before it is not, and c) because it is an escape from the every day.

people who look at the music industry from the outside might see the results, but not necessarily the reasons why these things come about. it is not just as simple as creating an image. musicians are generally pretty messed up people. so are artists. they are looking for ways to get through their lives, 'cause their dealing mechanisms are not all that great. and so, this is where this relates back to the article... young people everywhere, from times immemorial, have felt like they did not belong. their coping mechanisms are not always well developed. sometimes, they just want an escape. and that is why drugs offer such relief.

btw - it is not just young people who do drugs. and people with mental illness self-medicate at all ages (hello alcoholism).
Posted by Suse, Tuesday, 4 October 2005 3:00:30 PM
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Thank you Rowan and Nich

What I found disturbing in regards to drug use in the media was the Kate Moss saga, and when mentioning the situation with a 16 year old she said to leave her alone because it is normal for her and everyone knew she did beforehand. Because she got caught by the media she shouldn't be banned from her contacts as it doesn't hurt her work. I found it disturbing that the girl thought that drugs do not inhibate your work abilities.
Posted by jords, Tuesday, 4 October 2005 5:35:55 PM
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‘I found it disturbing that the girl thought that drugs do not inhibate (sic) your work abilities.’
What, you’ve never gone to work hungover? Or were you talking about drugs at the same time as working? Cause…I drink coffee all day.

This is what frustrates me, everyone has an opinion on drugs, but hardly anyone actually knows they’re talking about. Firstly, they lump all illegal drugs together – pot = CRACK! Secondly, they think alcohol isn’t included, or high up on the list of ‘dangerous’ party drugs, when the reality is it’s probably second only to amphetamines.

The last time I had acid, I understood that the way we see the world normally is like peering through a tiny tube with one eye shut, that what we believe isn’t necessarily the truth, it’s only what we’ve learned. I watched myself grow older in the mirror and realised that time is an illusion, just like everything else we perceive, and that right now exists forever. I understood that we are all one, there’s never any need to be afraid, or to suffer, that the only true god is love and it exists in all of us. Then the light fixture on the roof explained to me through physical expression how freedom from fear is freedom forever.

Now if that isn’t a threat to society, I don’t know what is.

Yep, good thing it’s illegal, we can’t have everyone realise that we’re actually all one! What would happen to the arms industry? The economy would be wrecked if everyone realised it’s an illusion!

See, this is what happens when I don't have anything specific to debate on...I start to ramble. :P
Posted by spendocrat, Thursday, 6 October 2005 10:34:34 AM
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Spendo, I hate to see you alone out there in cyberspace so I'll respond to your earlier comment. The myth is that the impurities are the cause of the problems. To quote the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre " ecstasy users tended to believe that the drug was safe and that it was impurities in their pills that caused health problems...
But in fact MDMA was usually the most toxic substance in party pills".

MDMA, PMA and amphetamines all have similar lethal dose levels, which incidentally are much higher than those for GHB and ketamine. If "pillreports" really were responsible and objective they would make it clear that all the substances that pass for ecstasy are very dangerous and there is no such thing as a safe tablet.

Anyway, I dont think the toxicity is the real point, the main issue is what these things can do to the mental health of some users.
Posted by AndrewM, Thursday, 6 October 2005 7:13:01 PM
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Lethal dose or LD50 actually works in reverse i.e. the amount of substance per body weight. Arsenic would have a small number compared to salt i.e. small amount of arsenic per bod yweight compared to larger amount of salt compared to body weight.
More effective to point out that amphetamine has the same LD50 as roundup.
Apart from that, I reckon the issues are separate with regard to mental health and drug addiction.
But not totally, like politics and economics.
Posted by The all seeing omnipotent voice of reason, Thursday, 6 October 2005 11:46:15 PM
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Mental Illness and the relationship it has to crime is critical.

Recently I was one of the many who put an innovative multi-level social development proposal for crime prevention, to the National Government, in round one. This project aims to integrate a regional "community development" plan, through micro-activities-development, among other things, into the present service delivery framework. The plan is long-term and works to engage the whole regional community.

Local Council and the School approved of the plan. At ground level we had real support, by those who want utilise such a program.The thing that amazed us is how difficult it is to dialogue respectfully with either Qld Health and the Police. Their lack of response to locals who suggest projects is nullifying, yet the National office insists you form solid partnerships with local enties. They offer no assistance, nor feedback, on how you might engage.

Cape York as you may be aware is highly isolated and needs Mental Health and Crime Prevention activity projects urgently.

My point here is, I found from the National office that there were some $20 million dollors worth of projects submitted (in round one) BUT the office only allocated 4million.

My view is that this is work done by "goodwilling Australians" for the "wellbeing of Australia". I believe $20 million dollors worth of project ideas, is possibly a sum that can be equated somehow as a value of the "social capital" potential designed by Australians for Australians in the areas of Crime Prevention.

Given that Mental Health in many areas overlaps, and is not seperate to the overal focus on "cause" of social ill, I advocate that $4 million is not a serious figure and reflects how the government inflates terror campaignes on the one hand but responds with piece-meal strategies at the core of the problem. Frankly I feel the whole national campaign on crime is an insult to Australians symbolising no more than a media propaganda. It is inter-related with issues in Mental Health and combined with the governments lack of response, is wearing down the heart and soul of our culture.
Posted by miacat, Sunday, 9 October 2005 12:19:10 AM
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Spendocrat “But I digress. I’ve had much experience with people with depression, manic depression and even schizophrenia, and I can tell you right now, if drugs are on the list of causes, they’re way down the list after things like abuse and persecution.”

I too have some experience of same. I know that drugs do have a significant effect.

On the good side, I know one manic depressive who medicates by doctors instruction to stay “sane” and avoid suicide.

Similarly, I know of a treatable case of mild paranoia which has been “self-medicated” and enhanced in to full on heroin dependency with associated side effects including imprisonment.

Illicit drugs and drugs of questionable origin and dubious content do devastating damage to the entire body, brain not excepted.

Perseus– The “music industry” as a cause for drug abuses, rubbish.
Marijuana, morphine, heroin and cocaine were deemed illegal when the only recorded music was on wax cylinders.

Kalweb – your post – “They wanted me to fix everything - but they did not was to take any responsibility for their very poor relationship with their child.”
A terrifying picture

Similarly, I know the prisons in my state (and I suggest every state) work at removing drugs (against the odds and criminal determination of the inmates) from the prisoners metabolism but the moment they are “out” and able to find it – drugs are again the overriding priority.

Ultimately, having spent the last decade or so emptying and decommissioning the old asylums and madhouses, I figure we will be opening and expanding them. The last thing we want are psychotic loonies running around out of control and wreaking havoc on the drug free majority.

People suggest prisons are not the right place but
Where is the ”right place” for a drug crazed psychotic with self induced schizophrenia, who contributes nothing and demands everything?

As Kalweb stated “they did not was to take any responsibility”.

No one else is obliged to take responsibility either and there are far better causes deserving of “human compassion” than that of the self-inflicted.
Posted by Col Rouge, Monday, 10 October 2005 8:40:31 AM
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